sort a list of strings by the number of words in the string

Question

I have a list of strings as such:

mylist = ["superduperlongstring", "a short string", "the middle"]  

I want to sort this in such a way that the string with the largest number of words is first, ie,

mylist = ["a short string", "the middle", "superduperlongstring"]  

Its a bit tricky, since if I sort in place by length

mylist.sort(key = len)

I'm back where I started.

Has anyone come across a graceful solution to this? Thanks.

Answer 1

Assuming that words are separated by whitespace, calling str.split with no arguments returns a list of the words that a string contains:

>>> "superduperlongstring".split()
['superduperlongstring']
>>> "a short string".split()
['a', 'short', 'string']
>>> "the middle".split()
['the', 'middle']
>>>

Therefore, you can get the output you want by sorting mylist based off of the length of these lists:

>>> mylist = ["superduperlongstring", "a short string", "the middle"]
>>> mylist.sort(key=lambda x: len(x.split()), reverse=True)
>>> mylist
['a short string', 'the middle', 'superduperlongstring']
>>>

You will also need to set the reverse parameter of list.sort to True , as shown above.